434 
Editorial . 
Am.  Jour.  Pharm. 
July,  1920. 
different  now  from  what  it  was  on  that  day  when  Moses,  incensed  at  the 
perversion  of  the  tribes  of  Israel  toward  idolatry,  decried:  "I 
looked,  and  behold,  ye  had  sinned  against  the  Lord  your  God, 
and  had  made  you  a  molten  calf;  ye  had  turned  aside  quickly  out 
of  the  way  which  the  Lord  had  commanded  you." 
It  has  always  been  a  favorite  method  of  the  extremist,  whether 
he  be  a  rank  demagogue  or  a  pure  sentimentalist  to  appeal  to  the 
emotional  in  his  audience  by  high  sounding  phrases  and  glittering 
generalities.  Pharmacists  have  been  declared  to  be  as  prone  to 
follow  some  "swan  leader"  that  would  pervert  them  from  the  straight 
line  of  professional  duty  and  service  as  were  the  Hebrew  children 
prone  to  listen  to  the  'enticer  to  idolatry'  and  thereby  forsake  their 
deliverer  the  true  and  living  God  of  their  fathers. 
The  best  test  of  the  validity  of  any  proposition  is  to  subject  it  to 
deliberate  analysis  and  so  we  will  dissect  the  several  phrases  com- 
posing this  resolution  and  present  the  isolated  statements  along^ 
with  the  undisputed  facts  in  evidence.  The  initial  phrase,  as  the 
premiss,  asserts:  "Believing  that  the  Government  committed  a 
tactical  error  in  'wishing'  the  liquor  business  upon  the  retail  drug- 
gist." We  note  here  (ist)  'believing'  (2nd)  that  'the  Government 
committed  an  error'  (3rd)  'wishing'  (4th)  'the  liquor  business' 
(5th)  'upon  the  retail  druggist.'  Each  of  these  integral  parts  of 
the  phrase  are  positive  statements  entirely  unsupported  and  some 
of  these  are  at  variance  with  the  wording  of  the  law. 
We  will  dismiss  the  first  of  these,  "believing,"  as  a  personal 
privilege,  with  merely  a  comment  that  it  is  presupposed  that  a  body 
of  self-respecting  and  thoughtful  citizens  in  giving  public  expression 
to  a  belief  have  given  due  consideration  to  the  reasons  therefore  and 
to  the  context  assigned  as  the  basis  for  the  asserted  "believing." 
The  second,  that  "the  Government  committed  an  error," 
whether  only  "tactical"  or  otherwise;  it  may  be  safely  stated  that 
"the  Government"  is  carrying  out  the  mandates  of  the  people  as 
expressed  by  the  adoption  of  the  Eighteenth  Amendment  to  the 
Constitution  and  the  statutes. 
There  has  been  no  evidence  whatever  of  any  "wishing"  but  quite 
to  the  contrary  the  law  is  being  deliberately  enforced  in  accordance 
with  the  provisions  of  the  said  amendment  and  statutes  and  this^ 
it  would  appear  to  us,  is  the  duty  of  "the  government." 
The  term  "liquor  business"  has  been  universally  applied  to  the 
